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Chapter 6. WebSocket Security

This chapter details the WebSocket security apparatus and the various ways you can use it to secure the data being passed over the underlying protocol. You’ll learn why it is always a good idea to communicate over TLS (Transport Layer Security) to avoid ineffective proxies and man-in-the-middle attacks, and ensure frame delivery. Discussion focuses on setup of the WebSocket connection over TLS with wss:// (WebSocket Secure), origin-based security, frame masking, and specific limits imposed by browsers to ensure messages don’t get hijacked.

As with any discussion about security, the content of this chapter presents today’s best-known data about properly securing your WebSocket communication. Security is fickle, though, and the cat-and-mouse game played with those who seek to exploit and those who work to block is constant and unending. Data validation and multiple checks are even more important while using WebSocket. You’ll begin by setting up WebSocket over TLS.

TLS and WebSocket

All of the demos so far have used the unencrypted version of WebSocket communication with the ws:// connection string. In practice, this should happen only in the simplest hierarchies, and all communication via WebSocket should happen over TLS.

Generating a Self-Signed Certificate

A valid TLS-based connection over WebSocket can’t be done without a valid certificate. What I’ll go over fairly quickly here is a way to generate a self-signed certificate using OpenSSL. The first ...

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